Isaac Asmov had a good idea of where the relationship between humans and technology was heading back in the 1950s. This is clearly demonstrated in his book I, Robot. Halfway in between a short stories collection and a novel, it is a book that uses recurring characters to portray the evolutionary trajectory of robots and the people who work with them to build a more highly advanced society.
Each story represents a step in the progression of robots in their development. These stories are framed as reminiscences of a robot psychologist named Susan Collins as told while being interviewed by a researcher. Dr. Collins herself is the main character in several of the stories.
It is fitting that a book about the development of technology would begin with the theme of childhood and so this is what I, Robot does. The first story is about a child and her relationship to a rather unsophisticated robot. Being a sentimental type of a story, this book would have gone downhill quickly if Asimov had not taken it up to another level. The engineering team of Donovan and Powell are introduced at this point. The stories “Runaround” and “Catch that Rabbit” are the types of problem solving stories that were common in the Golden Age of science-fiction. The team are faced with a dilemma and they have to use their scientific reasoning skills to solve their problem. Both stories confront the issue of robot irrationality; their robots are intelligent enough to work independently according to programming commands but sometimes the programming causes contradictions that cause the robots to stop working effectively.
“Reason” is also a story where Donovan and Powell face a potentially deadly dilemma; one robot has put his reasoning faculties to work and, like early human beings, arrived at religion as an answer for his own existence. The robot’s new religion bears an uncanny resemblance to Islam. No doubt, this was a joke on Asimov’s part. The two engineers try to use rationality and empirical science to prove to the robot that his religion is the product of faulty reasoning but the robot’s primitive mind is unable to draw the right conclusions. At this point the robots become a reference point to the humans that create them so that Asimov can make statements about human nature.
In the remaining stories, Dr. Susan Collins takes over as the main character. Some of her stories continue on with the problem solving structure that Asimov utilized so masterfully. By this stage, the robots have begun taking on some distinctly human characteristics. One robot learns how to lie for the sake of not hurting the feelings of the scientists at the corporation that created him. In another story, one robot becomes dangerous when he feels humiliated and envious, In “Escape” a fully self-conscious robot designs a perfect space ship and plays a practical joke on the engineering duo of Donovan and Powell by sending them off into outer space without explaining to them what is going on. These stories are not just about artificial intelligence though; they make statements about human nature and the limitations of the human mind. Dr. Collins is in constant conflict with her colleagues who think she is psychologically disordered. These same colleagues are unable to solve problems because their own emotions and shortsightedness interfere with their reasoning abilities.
This book ends with the stories “Evidence” and “The Evitable Conflict”. The former story is about a robot who becomes so human-like that it is impossible to tell the difference between man and machine. He runs for public office and gets confronted by a sleazy politician who wants to expose his secrets in order to win the election. The latter story is about how artificial intelligence has grown to become so powerful and so perfect that it runs the world as a smoothly functioning cybernetic utopia. The robots have become so perfect that they have found a way to identify agitated humans and remove them before they begin to introduce too much disruptive noise into the system. This is not a nightmare scenario though, as the robots have made the world function so perfectly that people feel no need to rebel against anything. Isaac Asimov’s take on a technopoly could be criticized for being overly optimistic. Maybe he could have taken a tip from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and come to the conclusion that conflict is a necessary part of human societies because without it we stagnate and never make any progress or even find meaning in the lives we live.
This cybernetically efficient conclusion is the logical outcome of a book of this sort. Asimov’s sentences are as smooth and polished as the components of a brand-new engine. He wrote stories that are clear, compact, complete and easy to read without lacking depth or complexity. There are no rough edges or frayed corners and even the descriptions of the messiness of human emotions is direct and without any unnecessary details. Maybe I, Robot is a little too polished. Its perfection is an imperfection at times.
In his day, Isaac Asimov had a clear understanding of the direction artificial intelligence was going in and he used his imagination to examine where it would end up. Along the way he raises important points about human society and whether we can even comprehend the technology we create. The fact that computer programmers don’t entirely understand how algorithms work after their software has been wound up and set to go just shows us that Asimov had some kind of prescient insight that a lot of other writers never had. Even if today’s robots and AI don’t look and act exactly the way Asimov predicted, this book still forces its readers, in a sane and healthy way, to question what our relationship to technology really is. These questions are still relevant today.
Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. Fawcett Crest, New York: 1968.
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